The Technology of Old Skool Rave

The main reason why synths like these were used so much in early 90s house / techno / hardcore is that they were already old (and therefore relatively cheap to pick up second-hand) by then. Now that they've achieved cult status the prices have gone way back up. I saw a Prophet 600 (like the 5 but with MIDI) going for $600+ recently.

No, Cubase or Notator.

Liam Howlett famously basing his whole set-up around the Roland W-30 sampling workstation, right up until after the recording of The Fat Of The Land

Urban Shakedown's 'Some Justice' was recorded using two Amigas with tracker software (sourced sounds via MIDI ala Atari ST)

If you are using cubase there is plenty of stuff out there to try, I use reason with distortion to create some NASTY sounds. Although it takes patience, you learn to do with what you got though, and milk it for all its worth.

an old atari 1040 will still give the tightest midi of any computer ever made. seriously, on the midi side it'll out perform a g5 hands down. try programming triplet hi hats and hear the difference!

(xpost)

Well that and the pole position sound

(& haha k-thanx for starting this thread, don)

You mean the early '90s bleep stuff - LFO etc. ?? It really is nothing more complex than a sine wave (for both the very low bass and the high melodies). The high ones would generally have reverb and/or delay on as well. The Akai sampler range conveniently supplied a default sine wave 'test tone' sample that was ideal for the purpose. The Yamaha DX range can also be set up very easily to generate a pure sine wave. I'm surprised that you couldn't figure that out.

(I have no idea (or, currently, access) whatsoever about the technology or the music theory involved.)

for yr more rave bleeps - n joi, altern 8, strictly underground etc., the roland sh 101 was the main source.

You mean when it has an almost brassy rasp to it (not the tinkly, pure sine sound)? Yes an analog synth (or sample of one) would be used to produce that raspier sound. Not necessarily an SH-101 though. Could be anything.

Isn't it? I couldn't believe my luck when I first stumbled across it...

By the way, if anyone is using an MPC, Hollow Sun also have a bunch of classic drum machine / beatbox kits with pgms already laid out and made available for the MPC1000 via akaipro.com. Should work on the 2000 / 2000xl / 4000 as well as the 1000.

https://themagusproject.bandcamp.com/

2 eps of old school rave noise that have been extracted from recently found DATs by one of the folks from The Auteurs ('The Cellist').
despite the age of these tracks, they still sound wonderful.

as per thread title :

Made with: Cubase, Sequential Circuits Pro-1, Roland JX3P, Akai S1000, Roland S760, Yamaha FX500, Roland Juno 60. As far as I can remember.

Roland releasing an analog recreation of the 808 and 909 was not expected.

If they do a box with a 303 and a 101 (and maybe a Juno), the gear world will melt down.

That reminds me - ages ago I stumbled on this vintage text file, which has a list of the equipment The Orb took on tour in 1993:
https://ftp.xmission.com/pub/users/l/lazlo/music/orb/etc/orb-etc-199304-techicaltourrider.txt

They don't appear to have used synthesisers at all. The only conventional musical instruments are a pair of Akai S1100 samplers (with 16mb of memory each). Everything else is turntables, cassette decks, a DAT player, and a CD drive, plus a load of effects, so presumably the live show was more a kind of live mixing desk mixdown. My impression is that Mr and Mrs Rave circa 1993 used Akai or Roland samplers if they were European, Emu or Ensoniq samplers of they were from the USA.

XMission itself is just as old - it was founded in 1993:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMission

"XMission also provides free accounts to hundreds of non-profit organizations and sponsors many events, including the Utah Open Source Conference, the Living Planet Aquarium, the Living Traditions Festival, the Utah Arts Festival, and the Twilight Concert Series. XMission has a policy of refusing requests by government agencies to monitor its customers without a warrant. The company announced in late 2007 that it would be upgrading to 100% renewable energy, provided by Rocky Mountain Power's Blue Sky program. This makes XMission the first ISP in Utah to use entirely environmentally friendly power."

Truly they are among the last of a dying breed.

The same directly also has a list of samples, dated 1993:
https://ftp.xmission.com/pub/users/l/lazlo/music/orb/etc/orb-sampleindex-19930412.txt

It's like a historical document at this point, a sacred relic. Imagine reading text that was typed by hands much like your own, but in 1993! That was a year and a bit after the first web page.

Rave-era musical gear puts me in mind of The Boys From Brazil, where some fugitive Nazis try to recreate Hitler. They realise that it's not enough just to copy his DNA, they have to copy his upbringing as well, and that's difficult. In the case of Roland's recent TR-1000 analogue drum machine it misses the fact that actual rave-era gear was popular in part because it was cheap on the second-hand market. Whereas the TR-1000 is around £2,500. It also raises the question of whether Roland is responding to Behringer's popular RD8 and RD9, which squeezed some of the same juice but at a fraction the price.

Was thrilled to see the TR-1000 announced as like so many I've wondered why they never took a shot at reissuing the 808 or 909 especially given the $5k or so current pricing. Have to say I'm a little less than impressed with a few videos I've seen: the Alex Ball one directly shoots it out against a real 909 and 808 and I absolutely prefer the original machines. Not being able to really nail the OG X0X sounds puts this box in the running with many cheaper options, such as the Roland boutiques (which have a vastly more appealing design/form factor to me), the Roland Cloud (which offers the same sounds as the boutique for the price of like Netflix, and a much better display to work on- seriously, the screen on the TR-1000 BLOWS), Behringer's own analog recreations, and frankly, Goldbaby samples. Cause if I'm just recording the machine into the DAW anyway, what's the difference?

yeah but SAMPLES! another video I saw goes into the sampling aspect of it but unfortunately the influencer (as an aside, how much of the price of these boxes goes into giving away free units to influencers who wind up discouraging potential customers lol, great job Roland!) who posted the video either couldn't create a smooth loop or the box can't, so he's demonstrating the features with a loop thats clicking hard on every reset. With tax this would be $3000 for me, so nah.

yeah but HARDWARE! yeah but the screen, which is absolutely required, is out of a 1998 Nokia

It seems really nice, but it's expensive enough that I don't realky need to worry about it. Plus, my TR-8S does just fine.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTMryJ1Fk/

it's taken me until recently to appreciate how special it was that a high school kid in my college band had parents who bought him an EMU in 1987, I got to record some improvs and demos on it that I still have

gah bad syntax but u get it, the thing lived in our house/practice space for months

also <3 at stir being an early poster itt

what emu? sp? emax?

emax I think

I have a Emax HD leaning against the wall that I got off Craigslist, a previous owner replaced the 1987 hard drive with a micro SD drive but the guy I got it from struggled to make it work right and AFAICT properly setting it up to actually make new samples will require software that only runs on Windows (to create fake partitions, etc.).

Was sorely tempted to just source a floppy disk replacement and see if I could use it that way.

I definitely wanted an Emax at one point when they were (are?) not terribly expensive. But they are pretty large and I lack the skills to keep vintage hardware alive.

Always wanted a keyboard sampler with an analog filter though! (and did buy the first new one that came out, the Waldorf Quantum).

Does your Emax have the Transform Multiply feature? It convolved sounds and made weirdness, apparently.